Baxter's building

In Friday’s paper, there was an update on the construction progress at the Baxter International site on the Newton-Walton County border.

It’s great to see that Baxter already has a majority of its top management people in place.

When finished, the Baxter campus will include 1.2 million square feet of building space. And though commercial production is not scheduled to begin until 2018, there already are local dividends being produced. There are 250 people, mostly construction folks, working at the site. One day last week, Baxter officials said, there were 13 or 14 different companies at work there.

And, Baxter says, it expects all of its current Georgia employees to be consolidated at the site by the end of the month.

The build-out of Baxter is going to attract other like business to our area, and we eagerly await their arrival.

We hope those prospective businesses pay specific attention to a quote from engineering director Scot Thomas, who said our local officials have welcomed him “to a greater extent than any construction site I’ve ever worked on.”